A Place Where a King Who Never Surrendered Still Keeps a Living Wife Before you're allowed near the tomb of Omukama Kabalega at Mparo, the caretakers ask you a question most visitors don't expect: did you have an extramarital affair ...[ read more ]
Igongo Cultural Centre: The Day an Eclipse Decided a War
In the year 1520, according to Ankole oral history, a Bunyoro army swept into Ankole territory near modern-day Mbarara, raiding cattle and villages as it went. Then, in the middle of the day, the sky went dark. A solar eclipse ...[ read more ]
Amabere Ga Nyinamwiru: Myth, Mist & Breasts of Nyinamwiru
A king hears a prophecy that his own daughter will one day give birth to the son who overthrows him. Rather than accept fate, he mutilates her, imprisons her in a cave, and waits for the threat to die out. ...[ read more ]
Walumbe Tanda Pits: Step into Buganda’s Ancient Myth.
In a shaded forest clearing near Tanda village, about 65 kilometers west of Kampala in Mityana District, the ground is pockmarked with more than 240 circular pits — some shallow, some plunging deep enough to disappear into darkness. To geologists, ...[ read more ]
The Baha’i Temple:Where All Faiths Gather as One.
Somewhere on Kikaaya Hill, buried in the ground beneath a white domed temple overlooking Kampala, is a handful of soil carried from a prison fortress in northern Iran and from the innermost shrine of a 19th-century Persian prophet. It was ...[ read more ]
Rubaga Cathedral: From Royal Guilt to Sacred Ground
There's a quiet irony sitting atop one of Kampala's seven hills that most visitors never hear about. Rubaga Cathedral — Uganda's oldest Roman Catholic cathedral and the mother church of the Archdiocese of Kampala — stands on land donated by ...[ read more ]
Nyero Rock Paintings: Oldest Unsolved Mystery in Red Ochre
On a set of smooth granite outcrops in eastern Uganda's Kumi District, painted in red and white pigment sometime before the year 1250, are markings nobody can fully explain. Nobody knows for certain who painted them. Nobody knows exactly what ...[ read more ]
Namugongo Martyrs Shrine: The Sacred Heart of Ugandan Faith.
Every June 3rd, a stretch of road in Wakiso District, roughly 15 kilometers northeast of Kampala, becomes one of the largest pilgrimage routes in Africa. In some years, crowds estimated at up to two million people — clergy walking barefoot ...[ read more ]
Uganda National Mosque (Gaddafi Mosque): Skyscraper of Faith
Two dictators, one abandoned construction site, and a chance late-night sightseeing favor — that's the improbable chain of events behind the building that now defines Kampala's skyline. The Uganda National Mosque, still widely known by its earlier name, the Gaddafi ...[ read more ]
Uganda Museum: East Africa’s Oldest Museum
Long before it had display cases, curators, or a name most visitors would recognize, the Uganda Museum was known to the Baganda people by a very different title: "Enyumba ya Mayembe" — the House of Fetishes. That's what locals called ...[ read more ]
